Hair
They say that it’s a head’s crowning glory. It’s true, but for me, hair leans more towards expression of thought and/or feeling. I’m not very big on beauty, but that’s not to say that I’m not vain. I am, to a certain extent. So why all this hair talk? It’s because I’ve had mine chopped off. Liarnsie, a very talented friend (who, I should say, had been handpicked by T&G’s owner to train in her shop) did the deed, although a bit nervously.

I’ve had the same hairstyle since college graduation and aside from the occasional trim (and extra pounds); I pretty much looked the same. My hair has been bothering me for the past couple of weeks, sticking to my neck in the most inopportune moments; shedding like hell; and just being generally an unruly mass. The deal-breaker was when I was sweeping my room and just like in nightmares, a hairball leered at me from the dresser corner. I was taken aback because the hairball was almost as large as a tumbleweed (yes, I exaggerate but it was big). I first thought that it probably was collected hair from me and my mom, who brushes her hair in my room, but the denial came off when upon closer inspection (don’t ask how I did it), I saw that it was all mine. That was the final straw. I said to myself “Confound it! I definitely want that fricking haircut!”

Liarnsie was initially scared to lop off my super straight, shiny mane that hung halfway down my back. I urged her to just give it a go, with my other friends cheering her on. So with my hair in its usual ponytail, Liarns with her hair-mutilating weapons at my back and supportive friends waiting with bated breaths, one resounding SNIP was all it took and then I felt as if a tremendous weight has been lifted off my shoulders. We all paused to take in the moment and almost reverently, the shorn ponytail was passed around, eliciting squeals and gasps as my friends took turns holding the ponytail. I felt a tinge of pride and regret when I heard them admire the disembodied hair. My shorn mane was extraordinarily lustrous with l’apartment’s pinlights glinting off the chocolate brown strands. My friend’s boyfriend asked if I could still feel it across my shoulders, like a phantom limb. Honestly, I didn’t feel hair there anymore, phantom or not, I just felt the cooling breeze of the electric fan. I did imagine my hair flying in the wind; draping across my face when I felt coy; my fingers running through it when I’m especially frustrated. Those, I realized, were memories of when I had long hair. It’s more of like how a person nearing death would remember everything about the life she went through before life as she knows it, is extinguished. Then, without a warning, I was handed the ponytail. It was surprisingly heavy but still very beautiful with a rather healthy glow. Even in its ‘final’ moment, my hair still looked alive, like it was still attached to my flesh. The tinge of regret dug a little deeper, almost to the point of despair. I was saved by Liarnsie’s skilled scissors-wielding hand snipping furiously away at my nape. It all came rushing back, why I wanted this in the first place. I then felt inexplicably relieved, relieved of the burden of too much hair, with life seeming a little bit lighter.

So now, instead of shying away with my hair, instead of lashing at my hair with my fingers, or letting my hair get caught in the wind, I am now forced to face these things and feelings head on, crowned in its chin-length, asymmetric, avant garde-ish glory. The only thing I’m worried about now is if I’ll ever get another corporate job with my edgy new ‘do.


Still Basking In Brilliance
Only Neil's brilliance can turn the most mundane thing into a compelling read.

"What you do when you imagine yourself unobserved
posted by Neil 8/20/2005 07:09:00 PM
I'm trying to remember the last time I was alone in the house, and I can't, but out of the blue it's happened tonight. Everyone else is somewhere else. It was just me and Maddy, but then, after an afternoon of running a lemonade stand with three friends, Maddy decided that she and her friends needed to have a sleepover. I tried suggesting vaguely that I'd be happy to take her and all her friends to a movie or something, but that didn't work. They need to give each other makeovers and do the things that only almost-eleven-year-old girls do, I was assured, as I dropped her off at the friend's and waved her goodbye.

So I came home to an astonishingly empty house, picked an ear of corn from the garden, cooked and ate it, and, faced with an infinite number of things I could possibly do in a house on my own, I decided I might as well carry on working on an extremely overdue short story. Which, I decided, my pen being empty, I would write in brown ink. This plan stalled immediately, as I was unable to find a bottle of brown ink. Not a problem: I simply decided finally to utilise the as yet untouched Private Reserve Ink Mixing Kit I was given for my birthday last year to create a shade of brown that would be glorious and lovely and the perfect colour to write a short story in. How hard can it be to make brown? I thought, It's just red and green, and I have lots of different reds and lots of different greens, so I'll just put a bit of each in, and I'll be away, which I did, and before long I had managed to transform lots of pretty ink colours into an entire bottle of ink the colour of toxic sludge: an unhealthy-looking liquid the exact shade and texture of industrial run-off after a heavy rain. It didn't look like anything you'd want to use to write a short story with, unless it was a very strange story about things with too many legs writhing up out of the old dump, and this story wasn't meant to be one of those.

Luckily, somewhere in all the messing around with ink bottles, I'd found an overlooked bottle of brown ink, so I filled my pen with that, and now I shall go and write, leaving the bottle of Toxic Sludge Ink to squat malevolently alone on the desk in the office, waiting patiently and inevitably for its time to come."

from neilgaiman.com